When I first saw the quality of the content Mike is providing, it should have given me a clue that everyone would want to get their hands on it.

He’s being very strict about only allowing a small number of members into the program, and when I talked to him yesterday there were only 97 spots left. By this morning there are probably fewer than 90 remaining, and I’m guessing that most or all of those spots will be snapped up by Eric’s Tips readers.

When I announced my buddy Jeff’s article converter site, over 100 of you joined. When I mentioned my friend Scott’s article ghostwriter site, over 60 of you joined in one day. Needless to say, I think once you see what the Article Underground is all about, those 90 spots will be gone pretty fast.

Okay, now I’ll tell you WHAT this is all about.

I consider the premier feature of the Article Underground program to be the 400 unique PLR (private label rights) articles that you receive each month.

Let me tell you straight up. These are better than the PLR articles that I’ve seen from other membership sites. I get the feeling that most article membership sites have one or two ghostwriters working for them, who churn out mass quantities of strikingly similar articles each month.

If you’re a member of another article site, you probably know what I’m talking about. If the site offers 250 articles per month, you might get 50 about “antioxidants”, 50 about “auto loans”, etc. So each month, you get to build a handful of sites that have the same content (unless you change it) as every other member of that site.

Mike’s program is different. He has EIGHTEEN (yes 18!) professional ghostwriters working for him. And instead of a handful of topics each month, you get a totally DIVERSE collection of 400 articles.

Let me address the “spam” issue for a moment. I’ve was accused by someone lately of promoting “spammy” techniques, due to my recommendation of PLR content. I’ll tell you the same thing I explained to him. Using PLR or ghostwritten content does NOT make you a spammer. Like most techniques, there is potential for abuse. Sure the possibility exists to create “spam sites” using PLR articles, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it that way.

I’ll tell you what IS spam. Ripping off RSS feeds and autoposting them in your blog without proper credit is spam. Scraping search engine results and posting them on your site is spam. Those types of content do not provide any value to the web user.

Those practices can also result in your site getting dropped or banned by the search engines.

However, with proper use of PLR content, you can provide real value to web visitors by presenting them with relevant AND unique information about the topics they are looking for.

I’ll give you an example. Let’s say I create a reasonably fair quality site, and I fill it with PLR content, making some changes to keep it unique. The site is built in such a way that users can find the content they’re looking for, or click on ads that they are interested in. And we’ll assume I choose to monetize the site with AdSense and/or affiliate programs.

Web users may find that site when searching for certain keyword phrases in the search engine. When they click the listing, they are brought to a page of relevant content. They can read the content or click on an ad. There’s nothing “black hat” about it. We’re not trying to trick the visitor into clicking onto the site, and we’re not trying to trick the search engine into indexing it.

That’s NOT a spam site. It’s a legitimate method of building a network of content sites. As Mike puts it on his site, “If you could build a ban-proof site in under 30 minutes that made $5 a day, how many would you build?”

Here’s another great thing about the Article Underground. With the wide variety of topics covered each month, and the low number of members in the program, you won’t have to worry about your fellow members abusing the heck out of the articles. You’ll have the opportunity to pick and choose the niches you wish to develop, with very little competition.

I’m personally excited about building a my own PLR library. Each month, I add the articles to a folder on my PC. Then if the opportunity arises that I need some content on a particular topic, I’ll have it right there at my fingertips.

By the way, if you want to get really crazy, I explain in my Inner Circle how you can turn your 400 monthly articles into 40,000 articles! And I’m NOT talking about using a “spam generator” or article spinner. I’m talking about making UNIQUE content and translating it into multiple languages.

Beyond the monthly articles, the Underground provides the ability to do in-depth keyword research, AND it has a built-in traffic system to get your new pages indexed FAST so they can start making money for you. Article Underground members get complete access to 22 article announcement blogs that virally spread exact keyword phrase text links using page titles. Anyone that recognizes the power of page titles matched with text links on high PageRank pages, will love having 22 blogs to not only get pages indexed fast, but also to get that all important relevance boost.

They already have many success stories of top-ten search engine rankings, and serious earnings being made.

In conclusion, I’d just like to say that Mike is a stand up guy and I trust him enough to send you to his site. He also knows what he’s doing. He’s a pretty humble guy, so he wouldn’t be the one to point this out to you, but let me show you a paragraph from his bio page…

I have enjoyed creating many web sites that have brought in gargantuan traffic. I’ve experienced web pages that have blown up servers with over 75,000 unique visitors per day. My original content web sites have achieved many milestones including numerous simultaneous top rankings on multiple search engines that have even crippled my $3,500 per month dedicated servers, choking the bandwidth of major tier 1 providers.

I should mention, that’s totally out of context. He’s not bragging about himself… that’s just one paragraph amidst a whole page where he’s talking about himself and his life. I just wanted to point it out to you so you understand that this dude KNOWS how to get real web traffic. In fact he knows more about it than I do, and that’s why I’m sending you his way.

By the way, Mike’s also offering a free 19-page report about “Ban Proofing Your Web Sites”, and over 60 minutes of free video, so be sure to check it out regardless of whether you think you’ll be joining…

I encourage you to sign up for the Article Underground now while you have the opportunity before it’s sold out. You can do what I’m doing, and “stockpile” your articles so you’ve got them when you need them. Many of the topics are “evergreen” subjects that will never go out of style.

I’m going to get on my soapbox one of these days and talk a little more about the spam issue.
As always, you can leave your comments here in the blog.

I have also done a lot of my own research on duplicate content filtering by the search engines.

I recently watched the excellent videos that Mike Liebner has produced to demonstrate the effectiveness of Article Underground. However since Article Underground has been going now for 6 months, I would have expected him to show results for a website with more than 2 to 3 pages.

The assumption in all this is that a member can achieve the same sort of results or better, than Mike shows in his video. However, I feel there is one big flaw in this argument and that is Mike is not using articles that the membership uses.

As a member getting your copy of an article indexed and ranked by a search engine you are competing against other members using the same article.

Mike on the other hand is not competing against anyone since he uses articles that no one else is using. He makes it clear he does not use articles from the membership.

Mike does make it clear that thereâ€™s a lot more to publishing web content with articles than just putting up a web page and heâ€™s right, there is a lot more to it.

Good article. I agree that there’s more to the game than just putting up a page with an article on it, but I think Mike’s reason for using different articles is because he doesn’t want to be perceived as competing with his customers, not because he thinks it would hurt his results.

I believe that if Mike used the same articles he’s selling, that he’d have the same results as he’s having with different ones.

An as far as competitng with other members for indexing and positioning… yes there is a little of that, but it’s so much less competition that other sources. I’ve done a lot of stuff with articles in the past, starting with the Article System, which utilized free-distribution articles from article directories. Even in that case, where there were 1000’s of people using the same articles, it was possible to get them indexed.

But the difference with A.U. is not just the lower competition on the articles themselves, but the lower competition on the keywords he’s targeting.

With the way Mike keeps his articles uncategorized, my estimation is that MOST Article Undreground members do not use every article every month, while a small handful of members post them all to sort of a miscellaneous site.

There’s no way that most people are going to take the time to develop niche sites around every topic covered. Therefore, for those who do take the time to develop a good niche minisite, or subdomain, or whatever– they should be able to establish more relevance and authority than the folks who just slapped the article up onto a misc blog.

Also, all of this does not take into account that you can modify the articles to make them unique from other members’. For example, you can run the article through Secret Article Converter and change it with one click. In my tests I’ve found that generally the output is just as legible as the input, with the ocassional mis-match, which you can fix by hand.

I think the low competition combined with a strategy such as that, would result in almost no competition for the article to get indexed.

But the main reason I’m an advocate of PLR content is because I’m an advocate of creating your OWN unique content, and in my mind, PLR content is a vehicle to build your own unique content quicker.

Hi Eric
I am on the other side of the coin and would like to know how to get taken on as a ghostwriter by an article site. I did try your friend Scott but I feel that $5 per article which he pays is not enough, given the amount of time and work involved. He did like my test article.
Thanks
Elaine

“scraping search engine results and posting them on your site is spam. Those types of content do not provide any value to the web user.”

Google, yahoo, and msn might disagree with you, considering their whole model involves the posting of search engine results, lol. And since spam is such a subjective term, article sites qualify just as much as any other. Still, one man’s spam is another man’s goldmine. 😉

Elaine- I’d suggest bidding on projects on Elance and Rentacoder. If your writing is good quality, then you can probably make more $$, but keep in mind as long as you’re looking for writing jobs on the web you’ll be competing with low wages overseas.

Shelina- I have not personally used AdGoldrush, so I can’t say. But I can tell you that Liz Sherwood is a class act, and I’d recommend any of her stuff. On the other hand, Mike Liebner is definitely a class act too and his is cheaper…

I feel like you could probably teach a class on how to make a great blog. This is fantastic! I have to say, what really got me was your design. You certainly know how to make your blog more than just a rant about an issue. Youve made it possible for people to connect. Good for you, because not that many people know what theyre doing.